Monday, July 21, 2008

Another great new feature of Firebird 2.5

Other than CREATE USER something really valuable has been added, the ability to query other databases.Using a table structure like my previous post what follows is an example of a query running on an external database:

The trick is the ON EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE clause, which allows you to specify a target database ("localhost:c:\pippo2.fdb" in my case, generally that's time to start using aliases) and the user/password to be usedAs you can see , no "dblinks" yet, but of course you can embed it into a view and join it (the stored proc or the view) with other local or remote objects.The querystring can also be built dynamically passing parameters.Isn't it great?

It's really great to see how Firebird is moving forward. I wish that commercial/proprietary products were anywhere near as effective at identifying what the users see as problems/limitations, and then the developers behind the product putting those things into effect. Postgresql has come along too in the last 5 years, but not, in my opinion, as much as Firebird has.